So I should be starting a bikini diet? Fat chance
It's body tyranny season. The time of year when we women are supposed to be starving ourselves ahead of seven days sunning in Mallorca. When magazines are packed with get-thin-quick strategies which promise to morph a burkini body into a bikini body.
Fitness glossy Zest reckons that it can deliver a flat stomach in six days. Since I haven't been acquainted with a 24in waist since puberty, 144 hours to a taut tum seems frankly miraculous, unless that's the time it takes for a new abdomen to be delivered from eBay or Amazon.
Zest's rival, Health & Fitness, suggests spending a little longer (four weeks) in beach-preparation mode but then it does give you an extra "bikini body" magazine to allow the physical perfection police to show you what's wrong with your current shape.
At least these magazines aren't pushing the loopy eating programmes which cause Rapidly Shrinking Celebrity Syndrome, though. The diets loved by the famous are said to include the protein-rich Dukan followed by Carole Middleton, the raw food (Demi Moore) and the baby food (Lady Gaga and Cheryl Cole).
But on the wacko summer weight-loss plans, an article in July's Elle surely triumphs. The magazine's witty beauty columnist Avril Mair is sent to see "fat whisperer" Mary Ascension Saulnier, a woman who asks your porky bits to pack their bags. Kate Hudson and Paris Hilton have both been spotted leaving her studio.
The diet industry - worth £2 billion in the UK alone - is famously good at pilfering our cash, especially in the run-up to beach Judgment Day. But paying someone who admits that her strategy is "I talk to the fat. And I just tell it to go" takes the biscuit. Or rather, it takes the low-calorie, sugar-free pretend-biscuit.
Saulnier would certainly find my fat is not for turning. Like a devoted boyfriend, it sticks to my side no matter what. I trained for a marathon - it stayed. I gave up chocolate for Lent - it stayed. My lardy layer probably writes poems about how it loves me and can't live without me.
This summer, as with every previous year and I hope every year to come, I won't be going on a crash diet. Nor will I be opting for the cheat's option: fake tan, which supposedly makes you look slimmer. For being hungry, waxed-to-the-max and dripping in St Tropez doesn't strike me as showing love for your body. Exercise and healthy eating do, even if they can't make you look like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
Dieting for a holiday is illogical, anyway. Making yourself miserable for weeks just so you have a little less junk in the trunk for the seven days when a few fellow beach-goers see it shows skewed priorities - like the people who spend September to December 24 shopping for Christmas presents. After all that deprivation, you really will need that holiday and to tuck in to the buffet.
I suggest we instead think of the 51 weeks of the year when we're stuck in Britain. Even with ice-caps melting and polar bears losing their homes, our weather remains pretty dire. A little insulation seems like self-preservation. So I'm writing my own nutrition book: the Woolly Jumper Diet. Start now and you'll be ready for winter. Its subtitle? Learn to Love Your Silken Layer.
